nto raging river beds. At such times
life for the country people was scarcely less burdensome than during
the droughts, for the heavy bottom lands became quagmires, and the clay
of the higher levels turned into putty or a devilish agglutinous
substance that rendered travel for man or beast or vehicle almost
impossible.

There appeared to be no law of average here. In dry times it was a
desert, lacking wholly, however, in the beauty, the mystery, and the
spell of a desert; in wet times it was a gehenna of mud and slush and
stickiness, and entirely minus that beauty and freshness that attends
the rainy seasons in a tropic clime. It was a land peopled by a
hard-bitten race of nesters--come from God knows where and for God
knows why--starved in mind and body, slaves of a hideous environment
from which they lacked means of escape.

Geologists had claimed for some time that there must be coal in these
north Texas counties, a contention perhaps based upon a comfortable
belief in the law of compensation, upon a theory that a region so poor
aboveground must of necessity contain values of some sort beneath the
surface. But as for other natural resources, they scouted the belief in
such. Other parts of the state yielded oil, for instance, but here the
formation was all wrong. Who ever heard of oil in hard lime?

Nevertheless, petroleum was discovered, and among the fraternity that
dealt in it Ranger became a word of contradiction and of deep meaning.
Aladdin rubbed his lamp, and, lo! a magic transformation occurred; one
of those thrilling dramas of a dramatic industry was played. A gypsy
camp sprang up beside the blacksmith shop, and as the weeks fled by it
changed into a village of wooden houses, then into a town, and soon
into a city of brick and iron and concrete. The railroad became clogged
with freight, a tidal wave of men broke over the town. Wagons, giant
motor trucks, caterpillar tractors towing long strings of trailers,
lurched and groaned and creaked over the hills, following roads unfit
for a horse and buggy. Straddling derricks reared themselves
everywhere; their feet were set in garden patches, in plowed fields, in
lonely mesquite pastures, and even high up on the crests of stony
ridges. One day their timbers were raw and clean, the next day they
were black and greasy, advertising the fact that once again the heavy
rock pressure far below had sent another fountain of fortune spraying
over the top. Then pipe lines w